Max Bien Kahn - Flowers (2024)

Making a record in your living room is not an out-of-the-ordinary affair in New Orleans—often, it’s a necessity. You can hear the sounds of shotgun houses—a distinct reverberation of a long, narrow room—on a lot of New Orleans albums. On Max Bien Kahn’s latest album, Flowers, you can hear four friends (Kahn, Video Age’s Ross Farbe, Howe Pearson and Cameron Snyder) convening at Kahn’s house, setting up a studio for a few days at a time, recording, taking a few weeks off, and then returning to each other and doing the same thing all over again. The quartet did this for an entire year, lasting from extreme lockdown to a post-vaccine world.

The result is a true departure from the maximalist Americana recordings of Kahn’s previous work. On the title-track, Kahn and Farbe wanted to explore the idea of “What if Suicide made a folk song?” and tracked synthesizers and a between-the-lyrics melody. On the spacey, vibey, cinematic “Ghost,” they created an actual ghost character through the song’s sounds, using a warbling synth as a specter. Kahn was aiming for a Phil Spector-esque, classic-sounding tune—where the producer would implement fascinating bridges. The chords move oddly, taking you someplace else for a moment and returning quickly. From track one to track nine, Kahn, Farbe, Pearson, and Snyder stretch the limits of their own pre-determinations, pairing electronica with lap steel in a way that feels historical and futuristic all the same– a record of distinctive earworms, timeless and lived-in, yet existing someplace beyond the folk bonafides that have long encapsulated Kahn’s off-kilter lilt.